


No Such Thing As Normal

by speccygeekgrrl



Series: MST3K Alternate Universes [17]
Category: Counterpart - Fandom, Mystery Science Theater 3000
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Multi, Side Story, Why do I keep doing things like this, it's weird - Freeform, this is a fusion between Lovers from the Moon and the TV show Counterpart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-30 04:28:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13942599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speccygeekgrrl/pseuds/speccygeekgrrl
Summary: Kinga and Max Forrester have been trained for twenty years to infiltrate the universe that might be responsible for the pandemic that ruined their own. But things in the other universe have gotten REALLY weird in the past six months, and the siblings are not entirely prepared for what they find on the other side of the crossing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So... I said I wouldn't write more AUs because I needed to get back to Lovers from the Moon... so this is ALMOST doing what I told myself I needed to do! I swear I'm going back to Lovers after this. But I needed to scratch this itch after watching all of Counterpart in a week. (btw: highly recommended, it's on Starz, if you like AUs and spy dramas it's a good one) This is set a couple months after the last bit of LftM.

“You know why you’re going over,” Joel said, not really a question at this point, but Kinga and Max both nodded. “This is by far the most important thing either of you have ever done in your lives.”

“No pressure or anything,” Kinga said, and Max elbowed her.

“We know what we’re doing,” he said. “We’ve only been trained for this for two decades. If we’re not ready for it now, we never will be.”

“The fate of our world hangs in the balance,” Joel said, and Kinga sighed.

“Can we dispense with the dramatics and get this show on the road? I’m actually kind of excited to see a world that hasn’t been terrified out of human contact for a change.”

“Remember that your counterparts’ relationship is different from yours,” Joel warned, and she sighed again.

“Yeah, no kidding, the surveillance has thoroughly nauseated us both.”

“Just… don’t get caught,” Joel sighed back. “You have two days to complete the mission. We need everything their government has on vaccinations. And if you do get caught--”

“We _know_ ,” Max said. “Do or die. We got it. Come on, Joel, give us a little credit.”

“You’ll get the credit after you come back,” Joel said. 

“Okay, okay, can we go?” Kinga said, waving a hand in the air impatiently. “I have an empress to impersonate, let me fucking _do it_.”

“Oh, I do not have a good feeling about this,” Joel sighed.

“Your confidence is just so inspirational,” Max said, rolling his eyes. “It’ll be fine. Trust us. We’re good at what we do.”

“Then godspeed,” Joel said, and Max and Kinga shared a skeptical look before he held the door open for her and they both proceeded down the long hallway to the crossing station.

“We’ve got this,” Max said softly, putting a hand on her shoulder when she hesitated just outside the door. “We know everything about them, it’ll be fine. In and out, no problem.”

“You still think so after how their lives have changed in the past six months?”

“Lucky we’ve been in the system this whole time, huh? Who would have thought that our childhood dreams would actually pan out for them?”

“We’re not like them, Max.”

“I know. We’re better than they are.”

“Are we?”

“Don’t empathize with them, Kinga. They’re twisted, okay? We’re the way things should have gone. We were always meant to be family. They just had to settle for the closest thing they could get to how things should be.” She looked over her shoulder at him, and he smiled at her. “Whatever we might have to pretend on the other side… you’re always going to be my sister and I’m always going to be your brother.”

“I know.”

“Are you ready for this?”

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”

The crossing couldn’t be taken in pairs. Everyone who went through went through alone. Kinga knew this, but worry sat in her stomach like a stone as she watched the door close behind Max and the light above it turn from green to red. Four minutes and thirteen seconds later it turned back to green and the door slid open. Kinga took a deep breath and descended the stairs into the crossing. 

She’d never been through before. It wasn’t what she was expecting. She thought there’d be some clear division of the boundary between realities, but it was just a long, low cave-like corridor with steps hewn from the stone, descending from where she stood and ascending to the other door-- the other dimension, the one she’d been trained to infiltrate since their dads had died in the flu pandemic twenty years ago. She walked across and through the door, and inhaled deeply as it slid shut behind her. It smelled… exactly the same, recycled and purified air, because on both sides of the crossing there were stringent measures in place to prevent cross-contamination between the realities. Cross-contamination like the one that took their dads, she thought, returning the smile Max gave her. Cross-contamination like the kind they would perpetrate, at some future point, but first they needed everything they could steal to help defend their world.

“They’re leaving for Los Angeles in two hours,” Pearl said brusquely as soon as the Forrester siblings came through the crossing station, walking and talking, “but there’s been a complication.” Their grandmother had been walking between the realities unhindered while her alternate version was busy tormenting some poor schlub with movies, and she’d been off-planet for a couple of years now. The experiment had died with Clayton and Frank in their universe, and Pearl had attached herself to the Satellite Office not long after that. Kinga and Max had been two of the first students of the School that had trained them.

“What complication?” Same question, same tone, two voices.

“You’re not going to like it,” Pearl said, and handed Kinga her cell phone. Max peered over her shoulder at the headline: **Surprise Princess! Kinga reveals pregnancy at 8 months!** Kinga made a strangled noise and almost dropped the phone. 

“ _Ew_ ,” she said. Max made a face.

“It could be Jonah’s?” he said hopefully. The Satellite Office had searched their reality for Jonah Heston when he was kidnapped by their counterparts; he’d died in the pandemic at eight years old. They didn’t have a ton of information about him. Pearl was their contact on this side and she’d barely spoken to him. From what they could glean from the media, he was a good-hearted nerd who was very in love with their counterparts. They wouldn’t come into contact with any of them if this plan went off, and Kinga was only a little disappointed to not get her curiosity satisfied.

“You can’t be seen by _anyone_ now,” Pearl said. “I’ve arranged for a diversion to pull security out of the building, and then it’s optical locks in the elevators up to the 28th floor--”

“We know,” Kinga said. “We know what we’re looking for. When are we beginning?”

“Three hours from now,” Pearl said, and Kinga nodded as they came to the first floor of the Satellite Office on the wrong side of the divide. 

“Ugh, this means I can’t even go out and get a cup of coffee now,” Kinga sighed. “How do you even hide a pregnancy for eight fucking months?”

“A really good tailor,” Max said. “And flattering camera angles. Do we really have to be blacked out for three hours in the middle of the biggest city in the nation?”

“I’ll find you a movie to watch,” Pearl said.

“A good one?”

“You never got more Star Wars on your side, did you?”

“...what do you mean _more_?” Max asked.

“No, I guess it was made after things split,” Pearl said. “There’s six more of them now.”

“ _What_.”

“You’ll be too distracted if I show it to you before the mission,” Pearl said dismissively, and Max grabbed her arm. She gave him a wide-eyed death glare, but he already looked deadly serious.

“Don’t fuck with me over things like this,” he said. “We’ve got two-day visas. If the timeline’s this accelerated, I’ll get a movie marathon after we pull this job off, we get a thirty-six hour vacation in a safehouse…”

“You’d better give us something to do for three hours,” Kinga interrupted him. _Ever the optimist_ , she thought. Even after everything they’d been through, her brother still retained his rose-colored glasses somehow. That wasn’t how things were going to go. If they did the job in six hours, they’d be home in seven. Nobody got to waste time across the divide, not even the sleeper agents.

“You can catch up on your counterparts’ public lives,” Pearl said, handing them each a tablet when they came to the Office garage and waving them into the back of a black sedan with blacked-out windows. 

“Oh. Great,” Max said.

“You have it easy, he posts lots of animal pictures,” Kinga said. “God, the internet is weird… technology here is weird.”

“I think it’s kinda cool,” Max said, turning his tablet around to inspect the back of it, then showing her the picture of kittens on the screen. “It’s like looking into the future. We lost so much progress because we got decimated.”

“Yeah, but their world is filthy,” Kinga said, slowly scrolling through other-Kinga’s Twitter feed, “it’s polluted as hell, the climate’s going off the rails, and-- oh…”

“Oh what?” She scrolled a little further down, chewing on her lower lip, and then scrolled back up and handed it to him. The tweet linked to an article containing a set of graphs showing the poverty rate plummeting and the economy bouncing since the Forresters took power, the immunization rate skyrocketing, and the homeless rate dropping to almost nothing. He read a little way into the article and looked at her with his brows raised. “Oh.”

“Looks like they’re making a real difference,” Kinga said. 

“We’re going to make a real difference too,” Max said firmly. Kinga chewed her lip and silently took the tablet back to finish reading the article. Their side had been completely taken aback by the coup their counterparts had pulled, as hard as information had been to come by while they were on the moon. Kinga was positive that there was no way their counterparts could have pulled it off without some massive hidden support, but they weren’t just taking over, they were reshaping society. 

This was what they wanted to attack? It didn’t seem right, now. Even if the pandemic had been this side’s fault, and that wasn’t a given, it hadn’t been done by who was in charge now and they deserved a chance to thrive… She wondered if she would be so generous if it hadn’t been her counterpart who’d turned things around. 

They made it to the safehouse in thirty minutes, a nondescript brownstone with blackout shades on every window. It was a barren, boring place, deliberately stripped of anything of cultural significance, and they chafed at being caged when they’d expected to be walking the streets of Manhattan.

“I was thinking,” Max said, and she perked up. “They’re going to be gone. We should go look through their home. I want to see what kind of stuff they’re into.”

“Do you think it’ll be really different?”

“I hope I still have good taste on this side. I feel like I want to trust his recommendations.” 

“We shouldn’t fuck around,” Kinga said, but she didn’t sound convincing. “We should stay on mission.” 

“You say that…”

“Aren’t you supposed to be the more professional one of us?”

“This is a unique opportunity to do intimately detailed recon on our other selves and you want to just ignore it? I think _that’s_ unprofessional.”

“We’ll see how long the mission takes and if we’re quick it’ll be a reward,” Kinga said.

“Yeah, okay.”

“Because you know you’re mostly nosy.”

“Shut up, it’s totally tactical. And you know you’re curious too.”

“I never said I wasn’t.”

“I bet your taste will be more different. Mine was pretty set by the divergence.”

“Is it unprofessional to raid their fridge?”

“Yes! Very!”

“I’m still going to do it.”

An hour and a half later, they were loaded into the back of a windowless van. Their destination was what was in their reality still called Trump Tower and had here been renamed to Forrester Tower (rather unimaginatively, in Kinga's opinion). Pearl was already in the back of the van. “They left ten minutes ago in a limo headed for JFK. Diversion is in place, it’ll be triggered when we arrive." 

 Kinga peered between the front seats of the van out the windshield as they drove through Manhattan. There were so many _people_ out. There were never so many people on the streets in their world any more.

The van stopped. Kinga shot a nervous glance at Max.

“We got this,” he said, and the sound of an explosion shattered the air. “There’s our distraction. Come on.” They peered around the corner of the building to find several people in uniforms heading toward the explosion and slipped into the building unnoticed. The elevator they needed was the furthest left, and before he stepped up to have his eye scanned Max pointed up at the scanner a foot above the one they were using and she bit her lip. Neither of them had ever met someone as tall as Jonah; Kinga had a hard time imagining him. Max hit the button for the 28th floor and Kinga took a few slow, deep breaths, the air of this place tickling her nose with something unpleasant but indescribable. “You know where we’re going after this.”

“Let’s hope they opted for biometrics on everything,” she said, and the door slid open on a reception area with no one at it. This floor was where all three of the spouses had their offices. As they went down the hall they passed an open door and Kinga froze when she looked through it to find dark eyes meeting hers. _Oh, **shit**_.

“Kinga? What are you doing out of bed? I know the bed rest sucks but I told you I was coming back with it--”

“Jonah,” she said, and he shook his head as he came closer. 

“You promised you’d try to stick to what the doctor--” This time when the words stopped it was because he caught full sight of her, and his jaw dropped. “Who are you? You’re not my wife.”

“Oh, fuck. You were supposed to be gone.” Technically, this was the point where mission protocol was suicide over interrogation, but that would be such a waste of all their training. “Look, I can explain--” When he reached the door, he looked out over her to find Max a few feet away.

“And you are not my husband. So who the hell are you people?”

“We’re Kinga and Max Forrester, just from an alternate universe,” Kinga said.

“Believable,” Jonah said, still looking at them both very closely. “What kind of AU? Zombie apocalypse? Nuclear wasteland? World War Three?”

“Pandemic,” Max said, and Jonah’s eyes widened.

“Oh, jeez, that sucks. Are you here for help? Can we help across universes?”

“N-no…” Kinga blinked. Who was this guy whose first instinct was to offer help? “Well, yes. We can pass information.” Max gave her a concerned look and she shrugged almost imperceptibly. If Jonah wanted to help them, why shouldn’t she just let him give them what they wanted? It was easier than hacking into their computers by far. “We’re looking for any kind of information about vaccines and vaccination.” 

“Well, we’ve improved the vaccination rate by eliminating all exceptions besides medical ones and adding incentives for fully immunized kids, we’re on track for 99% immunization by the end of the year. A little slow starting but we’re really pushing people to make use of their healthcare now that everyone’s got it.”

“When did you do all this?”

“I mean, it’s only been five months since we took over, but we’re still getting people used to their new benefits.”

“How did you _manage_ all this?” Max asked, and Jonah smiled at them. 

“The universe isn’t going to collapse if you meet yourselves, will it?”

“Not exactly.” Oh, god, this was so far off the rails that it was practically in the Mariana Trench. There was no question that they were going with him, and Kinga had no idea what to do except lie about her intentions, but she wasn’t entirely sure what her intentions were any more.

“You’re not going to hurt them, are you? You’re not like assassins or bodysnatchers or something?” 

“No, no way,” Max said, “we come in peace.” Okay. They were committing to this. It was absolutely insane and completely against what they had been trained to do but there was a zero percent chance they could not let this sweet and naive man lead them to their hopefully equally naive counterparts and some top quality human intelligence.

“Okay. Well, come upstairs, then.” Being in the elevator with Jonah made them both acutely aware of how goddamn tall he was, which should have been nerve-wracking or threatening but didn’t actually put either of them ill at ease. He seemed harmless. Kinga wasn’t used to being around harmless people. When they stepped out of the elevator, he paused them there in what looked like a living room. “Stay here for a minute, I just need to prepare them for this.”

“Yeah, okay,” Kinga said, and as soon as he was out of the room she clutched Max’s wrist. “What the fuck are we doing here, Max?”

“Making ourselves much more important than we would have been if this went according to plan,” Max said. “If they’ll trust us this easily--”

“I don’t think they deserve bad things to happen to them,” she said, and he paused.

“Are you questioning our mission?”

“Yeah! I fucking am!”

“So am I,” he said, and then Jonah came back, excitement in his eyes for the introduction he was about to make. He lead them down the hall and into a very large bedroom with a stupidly huge bed, which was currently occupied by a heavily pregnant version of Kinga cuddled up against a version of Max who looked more content than Kinga had ever seen her Max look. “Kinga and Max… meet Kinga and Max.” The look of alarm in her counterpart’s eyes made her think that they shared a sense of danger. She certainly wasn’t as trusting as Jonah.

“Hi,” Other Max said, sitting up a little straighter and looking them up and down. “You’re not contagious, are you?”

“What?” Kinga asked.

“Jonah said you’re from a pandemic AU. You’re not like, biological weapons, are you? We’re not gonna be patient zero?”

“No, of course not,” Max said. 

“Okay. I figured that was more evil than we were ever willing to go.”

“I think you should explain exactly how you came to be here,” Other Kinga said. “But since I’m on enforced bed rest and not allowed to move really… kick off your shoes and come sit on the bed.” Kinga and Max gave each other a look and Max shrugged.

“Sounds cozy,” he said, toeing out of his sneakers, and he sat cross-legged opposite his counterpart, who smiled at him.

“Just the two of you? No Jonah?” Other Kinga asked as Jonah sat on her other side.

“Our Jonah didn’t survive the pandemic,” Kinga said. “Neither did our dads.” She got up on the bed and leaned slightly against Max, mirroring their counterparts to put them at ease.

“When was that?” Other Max asked.

“It started in 1997 but all three of them died in 1998,” Max said. 

“Did you get split up?” Other Max asked, and Max shook his head.

“I was an adult by then, I wasn’t letting anyone take her from me.” Other Max and Other Kinga shared a loaded glance, and she looked at her counterpart.

“You’re not married,” she said. Kinga’s eyes widened. “You’re siblings.”

“Are you people fucking psychic? What the hell?”

“No, it’s just what would have happened if we never got separated. We’ve talked about this before, it’s… it’s an AU we considered, just not in conjunction with an apocalypse.” Other Kinga curled her arm around her belly and arched her brows. “If we hadn’t had that distance we would have been a different kind of close.”

“I have to ask,” Kinga said, and Other Kinga tilted her head. “Whose baby is it?”

“We don’t know,” Other Kinga said. “We want to figure it out for ourselves.”

“That’s really weird,” Kinga said, and Other Kinga wrinkled her nose.

“Too lazy for a long-form puzzle?”

“More like I wouldn’t be sleeping with two people at once,” Kinga said.

“That’s fair,” Other Kinga said. “The circumstances of our relationship were… very specific and unpredictable. For what it’s worth, I’m so fucking lucky that it makes me cry sometimes. I always dreamed of world domination, but this is just so much better than I had any idea could even be possible.” Kinga swallowed, uncomfortable at her counterpart’s blatant happiness.

What if Max had been wrong? What if there wasn’t anything twisted about the way their counterparts were? They seemed so happy, all three of them, and Kinga was sick with jealousy of her double’s seemingly perfect life. Sure, the thought of being pregnant was horrifying to her, but aside from that, it seemed like her counterpart had gone from mediocre villain to honest to god humanitarian when she took power, and Kinga just wasn’t sure she had anything that heroic in her any more.

“So you’re from an alternate universe,” Jonah said. “How many universes are there?”

“Only two,” Kinga said. She glanced at Max, who inclined his head. Got to give knowledge to get knowledge. “They split apart in 1987, but things didn’t diverge much until the pandemic began in 1997. It was brutal. People were catching a fever in the morning and dead by bedtime. By the time it was contained, seven percent of humanity was dead.”

“Seven percent,” Jonah echoed. “That’s… half a billion people?”

“Just about,” Max said. “It was indiscriminate. It killed healthy young people just as easily as old people or kids. Wiped out whole families in a matter of days. There were some really unlucky towns with survivors in the double digits. It swept the whole globe in a week and raged for almost three years before it could be even partially contained.”

“Is that why you were asking about vaccines?” Jonah asked. “We don’t have a good flu vaccine, ours suck pretty bad. It was like thirty percent effective this year.”

“Thirty percent adds up when it spreads that fast,” Kinga said. “We’re not interested in your flu vaccines. But we know there are other vaccines here that would be effective for us as well.”

“Well, we are pushing a very aggressive pro-vaccination agenda. Religious exemptions aren’t acceptable reasons to weaken herd immunity,” Other Kinga said, and Kinga snorted.

“Those stopped being accepted in ‘97. If you don’t keep up with your shots you’re heavily fined. We’re very, very stringent about hygiene and anyone ill is quarantined, if you don’t turn yourself in for care you can be thrown in prison.” Other Kinga’s eyes widened, and Kinga lifted her chin. “If something like that happened here, do you think you could do what you had to to contain it?”

“I mean, there’s a good reason we bumped the CDC’s funding,” Other Max said. “And since we made it illegal for pharmaceutical companies to advertise to consumers, they suddenly have larger budgets for R&D.”

“How are you doing this?” Max asked. “Because there is no way in hell that the three of you are getting all this shit done by yourselves.”

“What’s technology like in your universe?” Other Kinga asked. “Do people have computers at home? What’s the Internet look like?”

“It’s not really a thing for us,” Max said. “We didn’t make a lot of advances that you have here. Like your phones? How is that a phone? That’s a whole new thing, it’s not a phone.”

“Oh,” Other Max said. “Well, wait, you said things really started to split in 1997… did anything big happen in 2001?” 

“Fewer people died than in 2000. That was the first year the death toll went down.”

“Okay. Wow. Uh, none of this is going to make any sense to you then,” Other Max said.

“Let’s give it a shot anyways,” Max said, and his counterpart smiled.

“Yeah, okay. Kinga? You understand this the best of us.”

“We had a terrorist attack,” Other Kinga said. “3000 people died. Then we started some wars and a lot more people died. The government wanted a way to stop terror attacks before they happened. So a computer programmer designed an artificial intelligence to sort through all the data being collected by intelligence agencies to predict acts of terror, and it’s… kind of godlike? Like eerily omnipotent at manifesting what it needs to try to fix the world in an almost invisible way. And then, uh, there was another AI and shit got really bad and then Donald Trump got elected President--”

“That asshole from New York?” Nobody on the other side could understand how that happened. 

“Yeah. I had plans for world domination already, and my friend is the human avatar of the AI so we’re… collaborating. I’m a figurehead putting a face and a signature on initiatives I don’t have a ton of influence in shaping. We’ve been instituting policies that have been designed and implemented by a superintelligence that loves everyone. Which has made us _super_ popular, by the way.”

“You were right,” Kinga said. “None of that made any sense at all.”

“Yeah, sorry, I knew it wouldn’t,” Other Max said. “It’s basically science fiction to you.”

“Sci-fi sounds better than dystopia,” Max said.

“We were heading toward dystopia until we took over,” Other Kinga said. “I feel like we’re doing a decent job of turning things around now.”

“I have a question,” Jonah said. “What were the two of you doing in our offices? You said we should be gone, what did you come here for?”

“We thought you left for L.A., we were intending to access your network and take the information we could use back home,” Kinga said. “Technically, we should be dead right now since you caught us.”

“That seems like overkill,” Jonah said. “Literally.”

“What are you in your universe?” Other Kinga asked.

“We’re scientists,” Max said. “We studied at Gizmonics. Unsurprisingly, virology and epidemiology are pretty high priority fields where we’re from, and that’s what we know the most about.”

“So you’re the perfect people to send looking for that information,” Jonah said. “That’s convenient.”

“You’re the ones who made it convenient for us,” Kinga said. “The fact that our shared biometrics got us past the doors is the only reason they sent us. We’re just doing what we need to save lives.”

“Will you be in danger if you go back after talking to us?” Other Max asked, and Max shrugged.

“We’ll be in danger if we come back empty handed.”

“We’re obviously not sending you back empty handed,” Other Kinga said. “Just tell us what you need and we’ll get it for you.” Kinga and Max shared a glance. The Satellite Office was constantly going on about how hard it was to get real data from this side of the split, and their counterparts were just offering whatever they asked for with open hands?

“Excuse us for a second,” Kinga said, and she pulled Max out of the room with her, pausing a little ways down the hall. “Max. What do we do?”

“What do you mean, what do we do? We take whatever they’re willing to give us.”

“You know what the Office will do with whatever we bring back.”

“Yeah, use it to defend us.”

“And to attack them.”

“That’s not our problem,” Max said, and she put a hand on his cheek to turn his avoidant eyes back to meet hers.

“It will be our problem when they send us back here to do it,” she said. “Come on, Max, don’t fuck around. This changes things, you know it does.”

“What do you want me to say, Kinga? You’ve known the ultimate goal of the program since the day we set foot in the School. Does it just not matter to get vengeance for our world any more? For our parents?”

“Are you really ready to have a billion deaths on your hands? Because I’m not.”

“No,” he said simply. “I’m not either. Are you ready to be killed for treason when we refuse to do it?”

“No. But there has to be some other option we aren’t seeing.”

“Our options are pretty fucking limited here, I’m afraid.” Kinga chewed on her lip for a minute.

“What if we told them the truth?”

“Are you _crazy_?”

“Come on, they’re us, they’re just as smart as us. They want to help us. If we all put our heads together, there’s got to be some way to get us out of causing an atrocity that doesn’t end in our deaths too.” 

“If we tell world leaders about this secret, if you and I are the reason this gets out of control, if this results in our world getting devastated again--”

“Max.” He pressed his lips together, looking unhappy. “Do we want to be heroes, or do we want to be villains?”

“To which reality?”

“We can’t bring back the dead,” she said softly. “And… I can’t kill these people. I can’t even think about it without feeling sick. If today had been part two of our mission and not part one…”

“She’d be among the first to die,” Max said. “Baby and all.” Kinga nodded. “No. I can’t do it either. They’re so… they’re so _happy_ , I don’t understand how happy they seem. I thought I’d be disgusted by them but I’m…”

“...a little jealous?”

“It feels gross to admit it.”

“Yeah, but it’s still true,” Kinga said. “So, one more time: What do we do?”

“I guess we be honest with them and hope for the best,” Max sighed, and she nodded and lead their way back into the bedroom.

“Everything okay?” Other Max asked as they sat back on the bed. Other Kinga’s head was on his shoulder, and she looked suspiciously at them. Kinga found herself leaning against Max, taking what bravery she could from her brother’s resolve, and she shook her head.

“We need to tell you the truth,” she said, and all three of the spouses sat up straighter, fixing them with intent gazes. “We’re not here for humanitarian purposes.”

“Called it,” Other Kinga said. “What are you, assassins? Spies?”

“We really are scientists,” Max said. “But we’re not only scientists.”

“So what else are you?” She sounded impatient.

“Spies is accurate,” Kinga said. Other Kinga elbowed Other Max gently.

“I was right, you owe me.”

“You don’t need to win bets to get me to do what you want, you know,” he sighed, and Kinga shot her brother an uncomfortable glance to hear his words come out of his counterpart’s mouth. Max’s gaze was fixed on their counterparts, though, studying them as if he could ever understand where they differed and where they overlapped and what in thirty years of parallel but divergent existence was so essential to who they were that it persisted despite all that they hadn’t shared.

“What’s the upshot?” Other Kinga asked. “You’re spies, what’s your mission?”

“Gathering intelligence, this time,” Kinga said. “But that intelligence was going to be turned against you next time.”

“Virology and epidemiology,” Jonah said. “Finding out our weaknesses to exploit them?”

“Not just a pretty face, are you?” Kinga asked. “Yeah. That was the idea. We were going to use your research to benefit us as well, but… yeah. The intention was to start a pandemic on this side of the divide too.”

“Well, that’s hideous,” Other Max said. “You wouldn’t be telling us this if you hadn’t changed your mind about it, though.”

“Seriously, _are_ you people psychic? It’s creepy,” Max said.

“Just intuitive,” Other Max said. “What changed your minds?” 

“The three of you,” Kinga said. “And… that.” She pointed at her counterpart’s swollen belly, and Other Kinga curled a protective arm around it. “You’re… it seems like you’re doing really, really good things here.”

“We’re doing the best we can,” Jonah said. “We’re just lucky to have the help we do. It’s a lot easier to do good things when you have the authority and resources to back it up.”

“We don’t have authority,” Max said. “Or resources. We have our training and each other. Which means that we’re out in the cold having told you this. If we come back without anything, we’ll be interrogated, and if they find out we had this conversation, we’ll either be executed or imprisoned.”

“So you go back with something,” Other Kinga said. 

“Whatever we go back with will be used against you.”

“So you go back with bad data. They won’t know it’s bad for months.”

“Weeks, maybe,” Kinga said. 

“What would happen if you tried to convince them not to do it? Is this like… your government attacking us?” Other Max asked.

“Oh god no, no, it’s… the fact that there even is another universe is a very closely guarded secret defended by an intelligence agency called the Satellite Office,” Max said. 

“So the Satellite Office is attacking us,” Jonah said.

“Not exactly. There’s a… a faction… within the Office on our side, of people who blame your side for the pandemic that wrecked our side.” Other Kinga closed her eyes.

“Was it our fault?”

“Only conspiracy theorists believe that,” Kinga said. “But a couple of orphaned kids with a natural aptitude for bleeding-edge science were pretty ripe pickings for those conspiracy theorists when they started planning for a counterattack.”

“How old were you when you were recruited?” Other Kinga asked. 

“Twelve,” Kinga said. 

“But you and Max got to stay together.”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Other Kinga said, leaning a little harder into her husband’s side. “After we lost our dads--”

“When was that?” Kinga interrupted.

“Frank died when I was eleven, Dad died when I was twelve.” Kinga blinked and sat up straight, and Max gave her a curious look.

“You lost them at the same time we did, just about,” Kinga said. “But you got split up?”

“We didn’t see each other for six years,” Other Max said. “Not until she was an adult.”

“I met the woman who’s working with the AI now while I was at boarding school,” Other Kinga said. “And when the two of us found each other again, our feelings… weren’t fraternal.”

“Weird,” Kinga said, giving her brother a side-eye, then studying Other Max. They were meant to match their counterparts perfectly, but her brother had gotten sick in 2014 and lost sixty pounds that he’d barely recovered half of. He’d been lucky to survive it at all. His alternate self looked… soft. Not just physically but emotionally. He looked like a man who had more to live for than retaliation. He looked as kind as Kinga remembered Max being in the days before everything changed forever, and she _missed_ that about him. But she couldn’t imagine looking at his face and feeling desire, even with the obvious affection in Other Max’s eyes when they met hers. 

“So we went moderately evil and then turned good,” Other Max said. “And you’ve apparently been more than moderately evil, and this is your heel-face turn?”

“Our what?” Max said.

“Your turn toward the light,” Jonah clarified.

“We’ve spent our lives studying you, you know,” Kinga said. “All this recent stuff came as a shock.”

“The coup?” Other Kinga asked.

“The coup, the wedding, Jonah being more than a test subject, and _especially_ the pregnancy,” Kinga said, and Other Kinga smirked.

“The pregnancy was a surprise to everyone. But enforced bed rest seemed like a good enough reason to let the news out instead of letting everyone speculate about why I stepped out of the public eye.”

“And it’s a girl?” Max asked. “The news headline said princess.”

“Yes,” Other Max said. “She’s due in April.” He gave Kinga and Max a very studious look, then turned to whisper in his wife’s ear. 

“Ohhh,” Other Kinga said. “That’s… that’s not bad.”

“What?” Kinga asked.

“Well, you said you’d be in danger if you went back,” Other Kinga said. “What if you stayed here? We could give you jobs. We literally couldn’t ask for better body doubles. And if you’ve been in covert training for twenty years you’ve got to be able to handle yourselves, right?”

“That’s--” Kinga didn’t have any words to follow that up. She looked at Max helplessly, but all he did was shrug. 

“We’d be more of a danger to you, I think,” he said after a moment. “They’d send people after us, you could be caught in the crossfire.”

“I certainly hope they’d be more cautious than to accidentally assassinate a world leader or two,” Other Max said. “We could just fake your deaths here and give you new identities. We have friends who are very good at that sort of thing. You have to have a contact on this side, right? Who is it? We’ll just make it look like you were killed in the building.”

“Our contact is Grandma Pearl,” Kinga said, and Other Kinga’s jaw dropped.

“You have _got_ to be _fucking_ kidding me.”

“She can move freely when your Pearl is out jetting around space.”

“Oh, you mean my terrible grandmother and your terrible grandmother won’t ever be in the same place at the same time? I don’t know if that’s a relief or not.”

“She is pretty terrible,” Max said, and Other Max rolled his eyes.

“I’m almost certain that I get it worse from her than you do.”

“When’s the last time she threatened to poison you?”

“When’s the last time she said you’re not worthy to be a Forrester?”

“Never. I’ve always been a Forrester.” Other Max paused, blinking.

“Always?”

“Well, since Kinga was born and our dads decided to raise us as siblings,” Max amended. “We had our names legally changed to Frank and Max Forrester, and… they couldn’t get legally married, but we flew pretty far under the radar with matching last names. And when they both died, no one questioned that I was Kinga’s legal guardian.” 

“Did…” Other Max had to pause and clear his throat. Was he about to cry? “Did they get buried together?”

“No,” Kinga said. “No one was buried at that point of the pandemic. Bodies were burned as quickly as possible. We didn’t even get their ashes back. The body bags got zipped up and that was the last we saw of any part of them.” She watched their counterparts clutch each other’s hands. “Why, did they get buried together here?”

“No,” Other Kinga said. “Neither of them left a body behind. It’s... complicated.”

“I’d like that clarified at some future point,” Kinga said. “But first I’d like to hear more about this faking our deaths thing.”

“I’ll need to make a phone call or two,” Other Kinga said, and then she made a surprised sound and pressed a hand to her belly. “She’s kicking!” Kinga’s eyes went wide and she leaned forward without thinking about it.

“Can I feel?” Her counterpart met her eyes and for a moment they just stared, one woman with two very different lives wondering how far to trust her other self. After a moment Other Kinga smiled slightly and nodded, and Kinga crawled up the ridiculously huge bed and settled on her knees between Other Kinga and Other Max, one very tentative hand reaching up. Other Kinga caught her hand and guided it to the right spot, and after a second there was a strong kick just under Kinga’s fingers. “Holy shit, that’s weird,” she said, pulling her hand back. Other Kinga laughed.

“What, haven’t you ever been around a pregnant woman before?”

“No. A lot of people who survived the flu ended up sterile.”

“Did you?”

“No. I didn’t catch it. But Max did.” Other Max looked at his counterpart with pity in his eyes.

“You’ll never have kids? I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t want kids,” Max said, more than just a hint of horror in his voice. “In the world we live in? No fucking way. Anyone who reproduces is committing a crime against their children, if you ask me.” Other Max leaned back, wide-eyed at the vehemence, and Max shrugged. “I’m not heartbroken about it. But this seems like something you want desperately.”

“He does,” Jonah said. “You should see him talk about the baby. He’s so excited for her to get here. And honestly, I can’t wait to see him with her, he’s going to be the cutest dad ever.” Kinga moved back down the bed next to her brother, and she leaned in to whisper in his ear.

“I think we should take them up on the new identities.” He pulled back to give her a wide-eyed look, _really?_ , and she nodded.

“Are you really ready to walk away from our entire lives?” he hissed, and she smiled at him and squeezed his hand.

“Not our entire lives,” she whispered. “We have each other. And that’s all we needed to start our lives over once before.” 

“That’s true,” he said at normal volume, sitting back. “Yeah. All right. If that’s what you think, then I agree with you.”

“Agree with her about what?” Other Max asked.

“We’re willing to fake our deaths if you can give us new lives here,” Kinga said, and Other Kinga grinned. 

“Awesome. Hand me my-- thank you,” she said as Jonah handed her one of those tiny flat things that Kinga still couldn’t understand as a phone. She started tapping at it.

“This building is more than large enough to hide you in for a while,” Other Max said. “And if you’ll be playing our body doubles, this is where you’ll need to be based anyways. What do you think, the next floor up?”

“Why aren’t you on the top floor?” Kinga asked.

“We have a helipad on the roof,” Jonah said. “It’s more secure in the middle of the building.”

“Good thinking,” Max said. “This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had while on a bed, you know?”

“I’ve had weirder,” Other Max said.

“Weirder than letting your alternate universe self plan your falsified death?”

“Kinga told me we were planning on taking over the United States while we were in bed and I think that’s just a little weirder.”

“I don’t know about that,” Kinga said. “I think we win.” Her stomach growled, and she rolled her eyes. “Unless your alternate universe self revealing a plan to raid your fridge is weirder than that.”

“Oh,” Jonah said. “Well, we just finished moving in here within the week, so maybe ordering out is a better bet. What do you like? I wonder if you have the same taste…”

“What are our options?” Max asked.

“We’re in the middle of New York City. You can get almost anything here. Name it,” Other Max said, and Other Kinga looked up from her phone. 

“Whatever we get, we have to get enough for two more.”

“If Shaw is one of them, we need enough for three,” Jonah said dryly. “When are they coming?”

“They’ll be here before the food,” she said. “And then I’m afraid the two of you are going to have to explain yourselves again, in a level of detail you might find excruciating.”

“As long as we’re not being literally tortured, it’s a step up from what we expected the result of running into you to be,” Max said. “And… is Hawaiian pizza still a thing here?”

“Yeah,” Jonah said with a laugh. “Why, is it not where you are?”

“Pork is illegal on our side now. The flu was a mutated swine flu, pigs were slaughtered by the millions to prevent it from mutating further. The last time I had my favorite pizza, my dads were still alive,” Max said wistfully.

“Jeez, yeah, let’s get this man some Hawaiian pizza stat,” Jonah said, and Other Max looked at Max with a complicated expression.

“It’s my favorite too,” he said. “Dr. F. got me into it--”

“When I was a kid, even though my dad hated it,” Max finished. “Yeah. That was before the split happened.”

“So we have the same memories up until 1987?” Max nodded. “Before or after Kinga was born?”

“Before,” Max said. “A couple of months before.”

“That must have been when they decided to raise us differently,” Other Max said. “So your dads were… together?”

“Just short of married,” Max said. “But that’s still not legal on our side.”

“What, really?”

“And we _definitely_ don’t have three-person marriages.”

“Well, that’s something we instituted when we took over.”

“Just to legitimize your own relationship?”

“Hey, our relationship was legitimate before we got married,” Other Max said. “But yes, the motives were selfish. But we’re basically rewriting the foundations of society right now. Why shouldn’t we make our own lives that little bit easier?”

“I guess that makes sense,” Max said, and Kinga nudged him with her elbow.

“If we’re getting pizza, I want veggie.” Other Kinga’s brows arched. “What, is that different?”

“Pizza without meat is violence,” Other Kinga said, and Kinga wrinkled her nose.

“I don’t eat meat at all.”

“What, _seriously_?”

“Yeah. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was fourteen.”

“ _Weird_ ,” Other Kinga said. “Okay. Well. I guess we’re going to have a while to explore these differences. So… Kinga…” Kinga looked at her counterpart, who gave her that wrinkled-nose look back. “We need a way to differentiate you verbally.”

“Kinga Prime,” Jonah said, pointing to his wife, “and Kinga Alpha,” he said, pointing at Kinga. She shrugged.

“I’m okay with it,” Max said. “I’d rather be Alpha than Beta, at least.”

“Okay then,” Kinga said. “So… pizza and mysterious friends with new identities?”

“That’s the plan,” Kinga Prime said. “And I don’t care what the doctor said, I am getting out of this stupid bed and coming out where the action is.”

“I wouldn’t dream of trying to stop you,” Jonah said. “Come on, Alphas, I’ll show you where the dining room is.” Kinga hopped off the bed to follow him. She wondered if she’d get any time alone with her brother to discuss this before these mysterious friends showed up. She had a feeling that they should decide a couple of things between themselves before they were decided on their behalf… but she didn’t get a sense of malicious intent from the Prime versions of themselves. Maybe… just maybe, they could trust themselves.


	2. structural differences (or: Max v. Max)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max Forrester, emperor, has a chat with Max Forrester, spy. They're different... they're really different. And, despite his best efforts to be empathetic, Max Prime doesn't much like Max Alpha's attitude.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't going to do more of this... and then I did more of it. And there will be even more of it. I'm really, really trying not to count this as canon and complicate my already complicated series further, but... gosh I'm having fun with this.

"Here you go," Max said, and set a mug down on the coffee table in front of his counterpart. His wife had taken Kinga Alpha back into the bedroom to talk after Root and Shaw had left for the night, and Jonah had helpfully gone into the office to assemble a crash course in this dimension's technology, leaving Max the space to talk to his other self in private. Max Alpha sniffed the mug and gave Max a suspicious look. "It's herbal," Max said. "Rooibos and turmeric."

"I don't know if that's supposed to mean something to me," Max Alpha said. 

"It's not caffeinated and it's good for your health."

"Yeah, I don't ever trust anyone who hands me something and says it's good for my health. I prefer peer-reviewed studies."

"Drink it or don't," Max said, sitting down on the other end of the couch and wrapping both hands around his own mug. "I like it. You might. I'm not trying to poison you." Max Alpha didn't look any less suspicious. Max shrugged and sipped his tea. "You don't trust anyone, do you?"

"I trust Kinga," Max Alpha said. "Aside from her... no. Not really."

"Is everyone suspicious where you're from, or just the spies?"

"You'd be suspicious too if you knew what I know."

"You know..." Max sat back slightly, studying his counterpart for a minute. "I don't think this is going to get us where we need to go. So why don't you ask me the questions you obviously have, and I can ask mine a little later."

"Okay," Max Alpha said, and he picked up the mug and sniffed it again, expression smoothing out. "This actually does smell pretty good," he conceded, and Max smiled when he tasted it and made an impressed face. "What's your plan?"

"You're going to have to be more specific."

"You run the country now, what's your plan for it? What kind of leaders are the three of you?"

"Oh, we're not really the ones coming up with the plan."

"Right. Your magical computer god."

"Hey, she's not _my_ god. Only Root calls her that."

"But you call it a her."

"Yes, I use the pronouns I'm asked to use, because I'm not an asshole," Max said. "If the superintelligence that installed us as national leaders wants me to call it 'she', it'd be churlish to disagree." 

"I guess so," Max Alpha said. "You're still avoiding my question."

"What kind of leaders we are?"

"Yes."

"We're trying to be good ones," Max said. "We're trying to be the best kind of revolutionary. What kind of leaders do you have on your side?"

"Not very good ones." Max tilted his head inquisitively, and his counterpart frowned down at his tea. "Things got very authoritarian very quickly after the flu got out of control. Personal liberty kind of went out the window in favor of public security."

"Different cause, similar effect on our side," Max said thoughtfully. "Our measures weren't as draconian as yours, I have a feeling."

"Ever see someone executed for breaking quarantine?"

"Uh, no, I haven't. The closest thing to an epidemic we had here was a gun violence epidemic, and that's not a problem any more."

"It isn't?"

"Not after we made all the guns disappear," Max said, and his counterpart's eyes narrowed.

"You didn't make _my_ gun disappear."

"You have a gun?" 

"Obviously I have a gun, I was pulling a covert operation, you think I'd do that unarmed?" He pulled it out from where it had been tucked at the small of his back, and Max made a soft unhappy sound.

"Well. Okay then. That makes you one of a very small number of people in this country."

"I'm already one of a very small number of people in this country for more significant reasons than my firearm," Max Alpha said dryly, and he replaced the gun. "So. Max. What's your deal? What made you into the person you are?"

"Existential questions," Max said, and he sipped his tea to give himself a moment to think. "Oh, okay. When Kinga was born, they told you that you were her brother, right?"

"Yeah. The first time they put her in my arms, they said that she was my baby sister."

"The first time I held her, they told me that I was her second banana," Max said. "Like my dad was to Dr. F. I was always intended to be her subordinate."

"Weird," Max Alpha said. "Because when she was born was when my dad stopped being a second banana and started being a spouse."

"That didn't really happen here," Max said. "Their relationship was... fraught, I guess is the word. Not professional, not antagonistic, but... not overtly loving either. Manipulative, abusive honestly, but not without some level of affection."

"You didn't get a real family," Max Alpha said, pity in his eyes. "I'm sorry." Max put his mug down and fixed his counterpart with an indignant stare.

"I did get a real family. It isn't the same shape your family was, but that doesn't make it any less real. It's not-- not somehow _lesser_ because we didn't share a name until recently. I've loved her my entire life, same as you."

"Not the same as me," Max Alpha said, shaking his head. "The way you feel about your Kinga is not the way I feel about my Kinga."

"Yeah, no kidding," Max said. "But I feel like I can understand your feelings more than you can understand mine, because you think mine are wrong."

"I mean, you're married to the woman who's really my little sister, I think my sense of revulsion is pretty justifiable." Max froze, and then he sighed and turned away from Max Alpha, picking up his mug again and looking down into it.

"So you're revolted by us. That's nice. I'm sure that won't throw any kind of wrenches into our plans."

"No, I'm not--" Max Alpha sighed, sounding identical to Max's sigh a moment before. "It's just really weird, okay? We've been observing you for decades, we've known the two of you have been together romantically for years. But actually seeing the way you are with each other--"

"Is gross?"

"No. It's eerie. Because I can see echoes of ourselves in you and it makes me wonder what's destiny and what's happenstance." He looked deeply unsettled, and Max couldn't help empathizing with him. If things had been different and Max and Kinga had needed to infiltrate the Alpha world... he couldn't even imagine it. "And if we're going to be pretending to be the two of you--"

"Well, that's not going to happen for a while yet," Max said. "She's got another seven weeks before her due date at the very least, and you and I are... not quite close enough to pass for each other, I think. At least, not enough to prevent the paparazzi from making shitty comments about my weight when they catch me instead of you. On which topic, how are you so--"

"I got sick a few years ago," Max Alpha said. "I lost a quarter of my body weight in six weeks. I was actually in a medically induced coma for a week of that. When they took me into quarantine I was acutely aware of the survival rate of that flu strain and I didn't really expect to come out of it again."

"But you lived," Max said, and Max Alpha lifted his hands as if to say _obviously_. 

"Perks of working for a covert agency, I guess. My potential was valuable enough to expend the effort to save me. And Kinga wouldn't let me die, anyways. Even though I was in quarantine, every night she'd put on a hazmat suit and come sit by my bed and read to me. Even when I was in a coma."

"What did she read to you?"

"Science journals... articles by people we disagreed with... she'd photocopy them to bring in and then they were burned with everything else that couldn't be sterilized in the room." He smiled slightly. "Letters for me. She'd photocopy those too, so I had a stack of originals when I got out of the quarantine ward. She hated reading the ones from my girlfriend but my vision was too blurry to read them myself for a lot of the time I was in there."

"Your girlfriend?"

"Well, at the time. Things... didn't work out for us. We always had different goals but we didn't realize it until after I got sick."

"What do you mean?"

"She wanted a bunch of kids and a family-first husband. And I'm a secret agent with an unpredictable work life who was left sterile after the flu almost killed me. So... not really in alignment there. She was great, but we weren't great for each other."

"You didn't ever want kids even before that?"

"Honestly? Children scare me a little. They're so small and fragile and the ones that can't speak are inscrutable and the ones that can speak are annoying."

"Well, okay then," Max said, finishing his tea and setting the mug down before folding his hands together. "I've wanted to be a dad for as long as I can remember. Never thought back then that I'd be having kids with Kinga, but I'm... I'm so excited to meet our daughter, you know?"

"Is it _your_ daughter, though?" Max Alpha asked, and Max shrugged.

"She's my daughter regardless of where her genes came from. I'm married to Jonah just as much as I'm married to Kinga, the baby's all of ours."

"Yeah, but... you have to have an idea of whose it is," Max Alpha insisted. "At least a guess."

"Honestly, no," Max said. "She wasn't supposed to be able to get pregnant at all, her IUD failed. And the way the timeline works out, she had to have conceived after all three of us were involved like that, so... no. I don't have a guess. I have a _hope_ , a very selfish hope, but hope and reality aren't the same thing."

"You want it to be yours."

"It seems about time our bloodlines actually mixed. It feels like the natural progression of the course we're on that our dads began." Max Alpha shuddered, and Max rolled his eyes. "I'm not trying to squick you out, I'm just saying... your family bond looks one way, my family bond looks another way. I don't think either way is bad. They're just different."

"I'm trying to go along with that," Max Alpha said. "It's just... she's my _sister_."

"Is she the most important person in your life?"

"Yes."

"So's mine," Max said. "I'd do anything I could to make her happy."

"Yeah, me too."

"So what makes yours happy?"

"Fire," Max Alpha said promptly. "She's a total pyro. Indian food. The ocean. Making fun of movies."

"She _likes_ making fun of movies?"

"Yeah. It drives me crazy, she talks over everything we watch together. She was so jealous when you started the MST3K experiment up again in this universe, she always wanted to follow in our fathers' footsteps."

"And you didn't?"

"We have more important things to worry about than mocking movies," Max Alpha said flatly. "Like survival."

"And espionage."

"That too."

"It's funny, here I'm the one who makes fun of the movies and she's the one who gets driven crazy by it."

"Speaking of movies..."

"Yeah?"

"...you got more Star Wars on this side?" The look of hope on Max Alpha's face almost made Max laugh.

"Oh, man, yeah we did. A couple of them are bad but a few of them are really, really good. Actually, one just came out a few months ago. Premiered the night before our wedding, we spent the evening in cosplay... here, wait, one second..." Max pulled out his phone and started tapping at it. "Honestly, I'd be doing you a favor by skipping the prequels, but Rogue One was great and I'm loving the sequels. Here, look at this..." He held out his phone, and Max Alpha took it gingerly. "Jonah looked _so_ good in that flight suit. Of course, space pilot was his actual job, so it's not a stretch."

"Um..." Max Alpha got a strange look on his face. "Are you going to be mad if I agree?"

"No? Obviously not. Yeah, how dare you even think about agreeing that my husband is attractive, who do you think you are."

"Yeah, it looks really good on him. And that jacket suits you pretty well too." Max Alpha looked up with a familiarly wry smile. "Since when are you bisexual anyways? I'm pretty sure I never checked out a guy in my life. I'm not blind but I don't swing that way."

"It's a recent development," Max said, just as wryly. "It's not... it's not about guys, it's just about Jonah."

"What's so special about him? We barely got any information while you were on the Moon except for the show, our side knows very few facts about him, since our version of him died so young."

"Oh, jeez. What _isn't_ special about him? He's just--"

"Wait," Max Alpha said, holding up a hand. "Please don't wax rhapsodic about him, keep it factual."

"Ruin my fun, why don't you." 

"I don't need a love letter, I need data."

"You want data? Fine. I thought he was an okay guy until he proved that he was a genuinely good one, and after I started thinking he was a genuinely good guy he proved that he was actually heroic. He saved Kinga's life. I'm not being hyperbolic, she would have died without him. I needed his help and he was not just willing but eager to offer it. He really saved both of us, I'm not-- I didn't intend to survive her, I never really have."

"What, _seriously_? You'd check out just because she was gone?"

"Not any more, but then? Yeah. Absolutely. She was my purpose in life. Lacking that, what's the point?"

"That's pretty bleak and fatalistic. There's more to life than just your--" Max Alpha stopped talking very suddenly, and Max snorted.

"Sister? Yeah, there's more to life than just your sister, but what about your soulmate? The person who gives you meaning?" Max bit his lip for a second, thinking, and then ventured, "Have you ever been in love?"

"Yeah, of course I have."

"What was she like?"

"Smart," Max Alpha said immediately. "She was so smart. I met her at Gizmonics, she was in my intro to epidemiology class. We got paired up for a presentation and she talked circles around me. And I'm not dumb, by any means, but she was just razor sharp and so insightful. She wanted to make the world a better place and I wanted to make it happen with her."

"What's her name?"

"Mariah. Her name was Mariah."

"What happened?" Max Alpha folded his hands in his lap and looked down at them, silent for long enough that Max could make an assumption.

"Her graduate thesis was on the spread of Zika in sub-Saharan Africa. Her team had been on site for less than a week before the research facility was burned to the ground. There were no survivors. I, uh... I like to think that she died quickly. I don't know for sure. But I hope I'm right."

"Jesus, that's awful. I'm so sorry."

"She died in 2011. And I dated after that, but I didn't really put my heart out there again. It's cowardly, I guess, but... it doesn't matter how tough I try to be on the outside. I'm still soft and squishy and easily hurt on the inside. And I can't-- I couldn't let myself get distracted or attached to anyone when I didn't know when I'd be called to the crossing or whether I'd make it back afterwards."

"Anyone who wouldn't be going with you."

"The only way Kinga would ever betray me is by not coming back at all. If she died here, she'd be buried here. And that's the only way I wouldn't move heaven and earth to bring her back with me."

"That's... wow. That's intense."

"I think throwing yourself on her pyre is a pretty intense reaction to the same possibility."

"I guess that's fair. I actually threatened Jonah's life, I told him if he couldn't save her I'd burn the whole Moon down."

"Yeah, that's pretty intense. And he married you after that?"

"He understood that I was under an extreme amount of stress at the time."

"He must be absurdly understanding."

"He's the best person I know," Max said. "Not hyperbole. He's the most good person."

"You're obviously still in the honeymoon phase," Max Alpha said, nose wrinkling slightly. "Or are you always this lovey-dovey?"

"I'm basically a soft marshmallow shell filled with even softer marshmallow. Being in love makes me ridiculous and I acknowledge this. Sorry if it's weird."

"It's less weird hearing you talk about him than talk about her, so don't let me stop you if that's the direction we're going."

"I thought I wasn't allowed to wax rhapsodic."

"Well, you look so happy, and I've never seen that much happiness on my own face. So I kind of want to just see how that looks. Go ahead and talk about him. You said he was a space pilot, right?"

"Among other things, yeah. He's also an engineer and an inventor and he's made a couple of robots with robust AI--"

"Well, anyone who's been at Gizmonics is an inventor at some level," Max Alpha interrupted. "Invention exchanges have been a staple of the culture since long before the split."

"Yeah, that's true. Kinga's invention exchanges were never that great though."

"What about yours?"

"I wasn't a student at Gizmonics," Max said, and Max Alpha's brows shot up.

"You were _at_ Gizmonics though."

"Yeah, as a lab assistant, not as a student."

"Still, you should have been part of the culture there, you were there for years."

"I helped her with her inventions, I didn't really generate the ideas."

"Well, that's a waste of potential," Max Alpha said scornfully. "Unless you're a lot dumber than I turned out--"

" _Hey_! Not cool."

"I'm just saying, playing second banana kept you from becoming the best version of yourself."

"I'm sorry, if you're calling yourself the best version I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you. Vehemently." Max Alpha glared and Max sat back slightly, surprised that his own face could look that mean, then glared back. "I'm pretty sure my life's been a lot happier than yours."

"Happiness is a meaningless metric. All that matters is how effective you are."

"Your universe broke you," Max said sadly. "You got turned into a weapon, and I'm sorry. But if you genuinely don't think happiness matters, I'm not sure how to reach you."

"I'm broken? You're a feather pillow. Something so soft doesn't break. It just takes whatever shape it's punched into." Max's lips pressed into a thin line, and he stood up and collected both empty mugs from the table.

"I think I'm done with this conversation for tonight," he said. "You're kind of an asshole. If you're how I would have turned out if I'd been Kinga's equal all along, that makes me even more sure that the way things went for me is how they should have gone."

"You could have been so much more than you were," Max Alpha said, and Max waved a hand around.

"Hello, are you unaware that you are standing in the new equivalent of the White House talking shit to an actual world leader? I think I've done quite well for myself. What do you have to show for your life at this point?" Max Alpha's face turned bright red, and Max sighed. "I'm sorry. You're pissing me off, usually I'm not cruel like that."

"Usually I am," Max Alpha said, crossing his arms and leaning back on the couch, and Max desperately wanted to hit him for a fleeting moment that left him feeling sick when it passed.

"Yeah, I'm getting that. Look, just... stay here, I guess. Either your Kinga will be out in a minute or Jonah will come back with some tech for you to play with. I just can't stand to look at you right now. You look like a healthier version of me but apparently that's only on the surface." Max walked into the kitchen, put the mugs in the sink, folded his arms against a counter and dropped his head against them with a sigh. "I _did_ live up to my potential," he muttered to himself. "I'm exactly where I should be right now. My life is amazing, I'm making a real difference, there is _nothing_ wrong with the way I lived my life until now." He lifted his head and sighed. Maybe he should check on Kinga. If her alternate self was as much of a jerk as his turned out to be, she might need an escape route. Hopefully that wasn't the case, but... just in case it was, he should check.


	3. a total lack of synchronicity (or, Kinga v. Kinga)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kinga's conversation with Kinga Alpha goes more smoothly than the Maxes' conversation went. They have no experiences in common, and yet each recognizes herself in the other at least a little bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh jesus this is getting way out of hand but I'm still not done.

"Is it bad that I'm excited that you showed up?" Kinga asked as she settled herself back into the nest of pillows she'd built over the couple of days she'd been on bed rest already. "Because I was going to be _very_ bored until the baby came and I am definitely not bored now."

"I don't think it's prudent, but I don't think it's bad either," Kinga Alpha said, sitting on the edge of the bed until Kinga patted the bed next to her.

"I won't bite, you can get closer."

"I do bite," Kinga Alpha said with a smirk that was mirrored back at her.

"Yes, so do I. But I won't bite _you_. And if you're going to be pretending to be me, you've got to be comfortable around me." Kinga Alpha shrugged and moved a few feet closer, settling down cross-legged and with her fingers steepled.

"Okay. So. I think it's important for you to know that we don't actually share any experiences."

"What's your birthday?" Kinga asked. 

"June 21," Kinga Alpha said, and Kinga nodded.

"You're right. My birthday is the 20th. We diverged before we even came out of the womb tank." 

"We might have had some similar things happen, but we're completely unique people."

"You don't have to convince me, I believe you. Tell me about your childhood?"

"Overprotective big brother, one psychotic father, one very resilient father. Grandma didn't approve of their relationship but Dad didn't care. She was sure they were going to drop dead of AIDS because they were gay."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. Because nerdy and socially incompetent Clayton Forrester was totally going out clubbing in San Francisco when he met Frank," Kinga Alpha said, rolling her eyes. "For all his flaws, and he had many of them, he wasn't unfaithful. They really did love each other, and they loved us. My childhood was weird, but it's not like I grew up in a subterranean laboratory or anything." Kinga scowled, and her counterpart waved a hand dismissively. "Not a jab at you. Just saying, we had a cute little two story house on a quiet street in a part of town where we wouldn't get our windows smashed because a couple of queers lived there."

"Must have been nice," Kinga said, and Kinga Alpha smiled wistfully.

"We were happy until the flu torched our entire world. Gizmonics had been letting Dad's weird mad science shit fly until everyone's resources got reallocated to finding something, anything, that would mitigate the dying. Schools shut down across the country when whole classes started dropping dead in the big cities, and then it spread from transportation hubs to smaller cities, and then towns, and then it was pretty much everywhere. It went from something worrying to something fucking terrifying in about the span of a week, and then it just... kept being terrifying."

"You said it didn't take your dads until 1998?" Kinga Alpha nodded, looking down at her hands while she twisted her fingers together anxiously.

"Yeah. They'd been retasked toward contagion control methods. They were testing a theory using live virus samples, and..." She shrugged. "Their theory was garbage. And they were never as careful as they should have been. Dad started running a fever before they were supposed to come home for the night. Pop called us to let us know he was taking him into the quarantine center at Gizmonics, and..." She swallowed heavily, eyes closing, hands going still. "Two days later Max and I were orphans. The only reason he brought me along to identify the bodies was because I was too young to be left by myself. He had to carry me back to the car afterwards. I was crying so hard I couldn't walk."

"Fuck," Kinga said succinctly. There was a lump in her throat and the threat of tears that plagued her constantly during her pregnancy was looming hard. "I'm so, so sorry. That's awful." When Kinga Alpha opened her eyes again, she looked composed, which just made Kinga feel even more unstable in comparison. "What-- what happened to you after that?"

"Max took care of me. Obviously. Insurance companies were still paying out on death benefits at that point, we were all set financially, but... the house echoed with their loss. Grandma came around to check on us now and then, but... mine's not very affectionate. And then she recruited us for the School."

"Neither is mine," Kinga said. "Mine is directly responsible for the most misery I've ever felt in my life, actually."

"Yeah? What happened?" 

"I'm warning you now, I'm going to cry while I talk about this," Kinga said. Kinga Alpha looked around and grabbed a box of tissues from the bedside table to hand to her. "It feels like I cry ten times a day lately, I can't wait to stop being flooded with all these goddamn hormones."

"I don't even remember the last time I cried," Kinga Alpha said. "It's been years."

"Don't you care about anything?"

"I care about Max. I cried a lot when I thought he was going to die. That might have been the last time. I thought more than once about breaking quarantine and letting myself die with him."

"Seriously? You'd check out just because he was gone?"

"I considered it. You don't know what it's like to lose everyone you love. I came so close to that point and I just... I didn't think I wanted to survive if my entire existence was reduced to being a tool waiting to become useful."

"I do know what it's like," Kinga said. "He didn't die, but I lost him for years. Years that I desperately needed his support."

"Tell me about it," Kinga Alpha said. "I want to understand what makes us so different." Kinga nodded, wrapping her arms around her belly in an attempt to make herself feel less vulnerable while she opened up.

"Frank's death was... really unexpected. Bizarre, the way everything in Deep 13 was bizarre. One minute he was there, and the next he was gone."

"How'd it happen? Heart attack?"

"Ascension," Kinga corrected. "He was taken to Second Banana Heaven." Kinga Alpha made a completely baffled expression, and Kinga shrugged. "You said yours wasn't a second banana any more. Well, mine... he loved my dad. And Dad loved him back. But they were so fucking bad at showing it. They never said they loved each other out loud, not in front of us kids anyways. But their unhealthy tendencies lined up perfectly with each other's. I guess when you find the one person you're destined to torment, it changes your life as much as falling in love does."

"That's demented," Kinga Alpha said, and Kinga huffed a laugh.

"Demented is a good word for it, yeah. After Frank got taken, though, Dad... changed. It was like the sun had gone out. He didn't enjoy anything after that. He went through the motions, for a while, but it didn't take a long time for Max to be the only functioning adult around. He took care of us both, but... nothing seemed to make a difference in how Dad felt. So Max called Grandma to help, and that was when shit really went downhill."

"Shit always goes downhill when Grandma comes into the picture," Kinga Alpha said. "And I say that both as her granddaughter and as a spy she handles. She's heartless."

"Yeah. After Dad died--"

"How?"

"How did he die?"

"Yeah. Did she kill him? I wouldn't put filicide past her."

"Uh, well, it's... complicated, but yeah, kind of."

"Don't bullshit me, Kinga. Tell me what happened."

"He turned into a starbaby, okay? He stopped being human and became something else."

"...the fuck?"

"Yeah, I don't know how to explain it other than 'he was a mad scientist and weird shit is par for the course in that profession', and death is... their deaths were both... less final than your dads' deaths."

"At some point you'll start making sense again."

"They were both at the wedding when I married Max and Jonah."

"Any second now, you'll make sense."

"It did require an omniscient alien to get them both there--"

"Yeah, you know what? Never mind. Get back to the relevant details."

"After he died, Grandma told Max to get lost and she sent me to boarding school."

"And you went along with that?!"

"I was twelve years old, there wasn't a lot I could do to stop her."

" _He_ went along with that?"

"He had no legal right to claim guardianship over me. And Grandma always hated him. I don't know if she actually enjoyed breaking us apart or if it was just the most expedient thing for her, but she was ruthless when she kicked him out of Deep 13 and by the end of the summer she'd dropped me off in New York and washed her hands of me."

"That's fucked up," Kinga Alpha said flatly. "How long were you there?"

"Six years. I graduated the boarding school a couple of weeks before my eighteenth birthday and immediately came back and started searching for him. He told me he'd stay near Gizmonics, and... I found him. It took me a while, but I found him." She'd managed to stay composed up until this point, but now tears started spilling down Kinga's cheeks. "When I saw him it was like... like I'd been floundering underwater and he pulled me out right before I drowned. I'd missed him _so much_."

"Is that when you knew you were in love with him?"

"Oh god no. No, I didn't figure that out for _years_ after that. He was my best friend, he's always been my best friend, but I... I never really had a model for healthy friendship growing up. I saw how Dad treated Frank, and I thought that was... the way we were supposed to be. The way I was supposed to treat him. Disdainfully. Painfully."

"So what changed your mind?" Kinga sniffed and blew her nose, crumpling the tissue in her hand, but there was a smile on her face when she looked up.

"Some bitch put her hands on him and I wanted to fucking murder her. And it was like a light being flipped on. I'd been stumbling in the dark without knowing the shape of the room I was in, and suddenly everything was so clear." She looked very smug when she added, "The bitch got a broken kneecap, and I got what I didn't know I needed until it was happening."

"What..." Kinga Alpha trailed off, looking awkward, and Kinga arched her brows expectantly. "...what was it like?" She turned red, looking down at her hands, and Kinga bit her lip, very tempted to screw with her counterpart with too much information.

"It was sweet," she said, after beating that urge back. "The first time and every time since then, he touches me like I'm precious. Neither of us really knew what we were doing at first. We figured it out together, and as long as we've been together now, we're really good at..." Kinga trailed off at the complex expression on her counterpart's face and changed the topic slightly. "Have you ever been in love?"

"Once," Kinga Alpha said. "Her name was Ellie. We were at the School together. Trying to keep a secret like that in a building full of spies was never going to work. When we were found out, we were separated, and then she got embedded."

"Embedded?"

"She took the place of the version of her in this universe. And that was... twelve years ago? I have no idea what happened to her."

"I could Google her," Kinga offered, and Kinga Alpha looked confused. "I could look her up online. See where she is and what she's up to."

"No," Kinga Alpha said firmly. "I shouldn't know that. Because if I know, I'll want to go, and if I go, I'll get found out. I can't walk around with your famous face expecting to live my own life any more."

"You deserve a chance at happiness too," Kinga said, and Kinga Alpha's lips twitched.

"Happiness is meaningless. I don't get to be happy," she said dismissively. "That was never part of the deal. I get to be useful. I have a purpose. My purpose was to replace you, actually. So I guess I'm useful as designed, just not to the extent expected."

"And you're fine with that?" Kinga shook her head in disbelief. "What you want doesn't matter for anything?"

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," Kinga Alpha said.

"Or the one," Kinga said, head tilting. "Vulcans? You take your guiding principles from Star Trek?"

"It's utilitarianism, not Vulcan philosophy... At least I have defined principles. You didn't really stand for anything but yourself up until very recently."

"Ouch, but also fair. But I have changed a lot in the past year."

"Yeah, what's up with that? We had no idea what was going on while you were up on the Moon, Max and I got to focus on our scientific careers because the program had nothing for us to do related to you for years. We both got recalled in November when you came out of nowhere and changed everything, and suddenly we went from mid-tier agents to the most important assets in play. Considering the last data we had about you was the show, and how long that information took to cross, and all of a sudden your focus went from media dominance to staging a nearly bloodless coup--"

"Nearly," Kinga said with a smirk. She was still waiting to feel a twinge of remorse for taking a human life with her own hands. She didn't really expect it to arrive though. "Hey, have you ever killed anyone?"

"Yeah," Kinga Alpha said. "Once out of mercy and four times out of duty."

"Mercy?"

"The flu was going to kill him. It's a bad way to die. I did him a kindness."

"It didn't kill Max."

"The Satellite Office offers excellent health care. His didn't. No one was going to help him."

"What was his name?"

"Karl. He wasn't a very good person. But I'm not a very good person either." Kinga Alpha looked down at her hands, nose wrinkling slightly. "So. Max and Jonah. Ever love anyone else? Because there is a zero percent chance you're totally straight."

"Yes," Kinga said. "You met her tonight."

"The pretty one or the intense one?"

"You're going to have to use different words, neither of those is distinguishing."

"Short and scary or tall and intimidating?"

"Root," Kinga said with a laugh. "Tall, pretty, intense, and yes, intimidating at first."

"But those two are together, right? Root's got the same dopey infatuated look when she looks at Shaw that your Max gets when he looks at you and Jonah. Is it one sided, or..."

"It's not one sided."

"I kinda want to say 'too bad'," Kinga Alpha said. "You said the two of you were at school together?"

"Yeah. We made a lot of trouble together. We both thought we'd grow up to be bad guys, but... here we are now. She's basically the prophet of something that might as well be a god, and I'm the most popular leader this country's had since JFK, doing things more revolutionary than FDR. We've always worked well together, and... we both became better people because of the people who love us."

"That's sweet," Kinga Alpha said. "I'm sorry, I meant saccharine. Love transformed you? Really?" Kinga blinked, then looked pointedly down at her bulging belly.

"Uh, yeah, physically and mentally," Kinga said. "I don't recommend pregnancy as a good time, either. I'm stuck in bed for another fifty-two days and I get dizzy every time I stand up, my ankles have been swollen since January, and let's not talk about the crying."

"Yeah, that's never going to happen, I don't sleep with men." Kinga's brows shot up, and Kinga Alpha mocked her expression. "Your life is fucking weird to me, okay? I don't know how one day made so much of a difference in the directions we went."

"Your life went in a different direction than mine long before either of us was born," Kinga said, and Kinga Alpha shook her head.

"Couldn't have been more than two months. The split happened in April." 

"Whatever triggered it... You had a happier childhood than I did, I think. But I have a much happier adulthood than you."

"Yeah. I sort of hate you for it," Kinga Alpha said easily. "I'd kill for the amount of love you get just within this home."

"Please don't kill me and try to step into my shoes."

"Seriously, you don't have to worry about that. There's no way I want to mother your child, and the less said about your marriage..."

"I get why you take issue with Max, but what's wrong with Jonah? He's an amazing person."

"There's nothing wrong with Jonah except my lack of attraction to men. I'm sure he's wonderful, but neither of your spouses qualify as what I'm looking for in a relationship. Your friends, on the other hand, are _very_ interesting."

"I think you're going to get along well with them," Kinga said. "But I'd be careful if I were you. They're a little... possessive of each other."

"The intense ones usually are," Kinga Alpha said with a smirk. "Thanks for the warning. So they'll be back tomorrow...?"

"Bright and early, with your new lives in neat little envelopes. We can get you set up with apartments in the building tomorrow too, but you'll have to stay in our guest rooms tonight."

"Apartments?"

"Unless you'd prefer to live together," Kinga said. "I don't really know how close you and your brother are. I know I preferred living with Max to living alone, but we--"

"I would prefer that," Kinga Alpha said. "We share a place on our side, too. People's lives are more insular, and living alone was... not a good idea for me at pretty much any point."

"You've never been all alone, have you," Kinga said thoughtfully. "You've always had him to rely on."

"Yes. Except when he was in quarantine and I was afraid he was dying. It took him months to recover, and I took care of him every step of the way. We've leaned on each other our whole lives. We staggered sometimes but we never fell down."

"You're lucky. But I needed the time away from Max to put us at the right distance to become what we are now."

"Your life seems perfect from the outside," Kinga Alpha said, "but in a way I want no part of for myself in any detail."

"I hope that means you won't grow to resent me."

"No. I think the two of us will probably be fine with each other. You're not what I ever thought you'd be like when I imagined us meeting, you know. I thought I'd have a problem with you. But you seem like a decent woman with a lot to live for, and I have a lot fewer reservations with your plan for my future than the plan the Satellite Office had for me."

"Can we be friends?" Kinga asked hopefully, and Kinga Alpha smiled at her.

"Yeah. I think so." There was a light knock on the door, and then Max stuck his head in. 

"How are things going in here?"

"Great," Kinga said. "How about out there?"

"Not great," he said flatly, coming into the room and sitting next to his wife on the bed. Kinga Alpha studied him, and the way they both leaned into each other naturally. "He's... difficult."

"I'm sure you're a walk in the park," Kinga Alpha said, and Max shrugged.

"I've been told by many people that I'm easygoing, so I really don't think I'm causing the friction here. He just seems very... very judgmental."

"Yeah, that sounds like my brother. He can be inflexible."

"Was he ever kind?"

"He used to be. Before our dads died, he was the sweetest person I knew. But after we were taken into the School, he got pricklier and pricklier, and then after Mariah died it was like he grew a shell. There was nothing soft left after he recovered from the flu. I think the kindness got burned out of him. I'm the only person he cares about any more."

"He's incredibly insulting. I hope he's not this unpleasant forever."

"I make no guarantees," Kinga Alpha said. "Do I need to go smooth ruffled feathers or are you the only one who got upset?"

"If you wouldn't mind." She hopped off the bed and smiled at them. 

"No problem. Good night, then." Max waited for the bedroom door to close behind her before he dropped his head to Kinga's shoulder and sighed deeply.

"Other universe me is an _asshole_."

"Well, you couldn't be wonderful in both universes. You have to balance each other out."

"Do you balance yours out?"

"She's not an asshole, at least."

"Do you think this is really going to work? Or are we making a gigantic mistake by doing this?"

"We wouldn't be doing it if we thought it was a mistake," Kinga said. "And Root wouldn't help if it was a mistake. It'll work out, it'll just take some time."

"I hope you're right."

"I'm always right. I can't believe you still haven't learned that."

"Oh, of course. My mistake."


End file.
